Transcript of Ken MacLeod video

Science fiction in Scotland

I'm Ken MacLeod, I'm a science fiction writer, I live near
Edinburgh and I've written 12 novels over the past 12 or 13 years
or so.

[Question on screen] What inspired you to
become a science fiction writer?

Actually what inspired me to become a science fiction writer, I
guess, was reading science fiction. Like many people, I came across
it in my early teens quite by chance although I had read science
fiction before as boys' adventures and so forth.

But the first time I came across a book that was, as it were,
presented as science fiction was 'Rocket to Limbo' by Alan E
Nourse who wrote many books mainly for young people. And it was
in the junior library in Greenock where I grew up.

Once I read that book I was completely hooked. And I guess for
an embarrassingly long number of years actually, the next ten years
or so, I probably didn't voluntarily read any fiction other than
science fiction.

Amazingly, this got me as far as first year English at
university. However I never actually thought of myself as
potentially a writer unlike my friend Iain
Banks who had formed the ambition to be a writer at some
astonishing age and set out persistently to do it.

No, what SF inspired me to do was to want to be a scientist.
However, I wasn't terribly good at maths so I ended up with the
least mathematical degree available, a zoology degree.

I went off and did research in bio-mechanics and every so often
I would make some really amateurish attempt to write a story. I
would proudly send it off to whatever magazine was publishing SF at
that time in the UK and gradually collected a few rejection
slips.

The stories were all pretty dire. I think the … what's the
opposite of zenith? … the nadir of this attempt to go into science
fiction by the normal route of writing short stories and having
them published in magazines was when I sent a story to 'Interzone'. This was the main
British science fiction magazine in the early '90s and the
rejection slip kindly suggested that I try submitting my stories to
local fanzines.

So I submitted my story to a local fanzine, 'New Dawn Fades'
many of whose contributors have gone on to greater things and they
rejected it! So after that there was nothing for it but to write a
novel.

More seriously, I had had ideas for science fiction novels for
quite a number of years. I had plenty of ideas.

[Question on screen] Where did you get
these ideas from?

I'm basically just an interested lay person for almost all areas
of science including computers to be honest. I read 'New Scientist' from cover
to cover more or less every week. I follow science websites and you
know, click on any science-related links. There's also my twitter
feed and this kind of thing. That's how I keep up-to-date as much
as I can with science and technology developments.

I've also, if I could add, have done a little bit of work in the
area of public engagement with science through my residency in 2009
at the Genomics
Forum at Edinburgh University. That's a small part of a network
of sociological institutions, of social scientists who study
natural scientists at work as it were.

I had to keep biting my tongue when I first started off at the
Genomics Forum because I kept saying things like 'social scientists
and actual scientists' — ah, no!

[Question on screen] Do you think there is
a uniquely Scottish dimension to science fiction
writing?

Science fiction is kind of unique in terms of genre and in terms
of mainstream fiction in relation to its nationality. It's a very
consciously international, or at least international in the English
speaking world sense.

I think that science fiction as a genre has offered Scottish
writers the opportunity to write for an international audience and
become somewhat more cosmopolitan than they otherwise might be.

Not that that's necessarily, you know, a wonderful selling
point. As we see from the crime genre having a very
Scottish-focused and local approach works very well in appealing to
an international audience.